


Hypothermia Patrol

by lasergirl



Category: Doom Patrol (TV)
Genre: Angst, Bathing/Washing, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, because he's radioactive, naked Larry Trainor should be his own warning
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-13
Updated: 2019-05-13
Packaged: 2020-03-02 10:26:33
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,484
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18809299
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lasergirl/pseuds/lasergirl
Summary: The Negative Spirit leaves Larry in a chilly situation and Rita is the best (only?) friend Larry has. Takes place sometime before the Doom Patrol TV series but is pretty much unspecified.





	Hypothermia Patrol

Larry is cold all the time. It has everything to do, he knows, with the experimental plane crash. Once, his skin had useful parts of it like hair and fat to insulate his body and keep him warm, but the jet fuel barbeque and the high dose of extra-terrestrial radiation had taken that away from him.

Oh, and he used to have nerves, too. He routinely checks running water with a battered old mercury thermometer and doesn’t stand too close to the open fireplace. He can’t trust the ruined neural pathways in his hands and feet to decide if the heat will cook the more sensitive skin of his underarms, ribs, his thighs.

Usually, his various layers kept him reasonably comfortable; the specially-treated bandages that he and Caulder had devised, the cozy wool turtleneck, his gloves, and lined raincoat. But it had started raining before the Negative Spirit burst out of his corporeal shell and Larry had dropped, unconscious as always, to the ground. His coat and glasses had been rimmed with icy rain, his coat soaked through, boots sodden and freezing by the time the Spirit returned.

Larry had picked himself up with a resigned sigh, but it wasn’t until he was halfway back to the mansion that his broken body put the signals together and he started to shiver. Rita found him hallway up the grand staircase, calf muscles knotted and his body shaking violently. She had a hand on his shoulder and a delicate frown on her brow.

“Larry?”

He could barely unclench his jaw, teeth clicking together as he spit out, “C-cold.”

“Goodness, you’re soaked to the bone,” her arm was like a band of iron under his, around his chest as she heaved him to his feet. Once, she had been gentle and hesitant with her touches, but this was much more forceful. “Let’s get you into a nice warm bath.”

And then, she is brutally efficient, dragging him up the stairs and depositing his shivering body on a chair near her door while she slips effortlessly into her rarely-used containment suit. It had been bumped up against Larry’s unique radiation emissions by The Chief’s solution for treating Larry’s miles of bandages. (A solution, she has always reminded him with distaste, that Niles has neglected to share with any of the Manor’s full-time residents, “just in case.”)

Once garbed, there’s no stopping her. Rita hauls him through the decontamination chamber and through his dimly-lit, lead-lined bedroom straight into his private bathroom. There are no mirrors here, and what isn’t pale grey cement is white ceramic tiles. Infrared and grow lights dot the ceiling, encouraging the masses of green tropical plants, vines, and flowering orchids to flourish and trail across the walls and floor.

Larry is too miserable to enjoy his little oasis, and Rita is too focussed on her mission to make much note of it. She drags him to the bench where he spends so much of his time wrapping and unwrapping the bandages that cover him from head to foot. Beside it is the battered, lead-lined laundry bin that he lugs back and forth to the wash. He’s still shivering so badly he can’t make his hands do what he wants them to.

“You’re gonna have to help,” he grunts, as he attempts to peel his coat off. It slaps wetly against the tiled floor. “Temp should be 105.”

“Of course,” Rita cranks the taps into the tub and runs the water over the ancient brass thermometer. “Now, let’s get you out of these wet things.”

Larry doesn’t remember when he stopped being as sensitive about the way he looked. When he had first met Rita, he recalled being desperately jealous - god only knows why – that she was absolutely stunning. True, on her bad days she was little more than a mass of soft tissue, but at least she could come down to dinner and be able to show her face.

Rita strips the glasses off and unhooks his suspenders. “Arms up,” she orders and works the turtleneck sweater off his torso. “Feet.” 

At least his legs are starting to obey him again, although feeling what’s left of his toes is still a distant hope. She unlaces his boots and shucks them off, strips his pants down to his ankles so he can step out of them.

“I can take it from here,” Larry offers, although his hands are shaking badly. He makes an abortive attempt to unwrap the bandages around one elbow and stalls out when a violent shudder works its way through his body.

“Nonsense,” Rita huffs, and puts her containment-suited hand against his chest as support. He just wants to lean into it and stay there forever. No one touches him anymore… hardly anyone can, and he doesn’t know why anyone would ever want to.

His burned skin is scarred white in patches, angry red and blackened in others, revealed painfully inch by inch as the bandages unravel. When he had walked from the wreckage, jet fuel soaked into his flight suit and had caught fire. Any normal, non-entity-inhabited person would have died on the spot, or at least shortly after the flames were extinguished. But oh, not Larry.

His extremities are the worst. For the most part, only pressure sensitivity remains in his hands and feet. It had taken a few decades for the nerves in his arms and legs to sort themselves out and he can mostly move normally without much pain. Across his chest, sides and back are scattered some areas with nearly normal sensation, but then contrast that with the way his skin looked, and it didn’t really matter. What good would being able to feel a gentle touch be, if no one would dare touch him at all?

He doesn’t know what Rita’s thinking and he doesn’t want to know. She helps him stand after he is completely disrobed and eases him into the filling bathtub. He tries to avert his gaze, to offer her the weak attempt at ignoring his total and obvious misery, but she catches it and makes him match it.

“This will make you feel better,” she tells him, with the confidence behind her words to make it true no matter his condition. And slowly, through his body’s malfunctioning muscles and nerves, the warmth begins to seep through.

The clench in his jaw begins to fade and Larry can finally draw a full breath into his aching lungs. The bathroom smells like humidity and damp soil, and the rushing water ripples over his trembling arms and legs. And Rita is still there, drawing a washcloth across his scarred shoulders. His fingers finally obey him as he takes the cloth from her gloved hand. His mouth opens but no words come.

“I’ll bring up some hot broth when you’re ready.” The moment broken, Rita crinkles back into action again, laying out a fresh towel and his bathrobe and slippers. “Just ring the kitchen.”

Larry shuts the bath water off as she goes and hears the hiss-clunk of the decontamination airlock closing behind her. He stays in the bath for a long time, running hot water in periodically. If he still had fingertips and toes, they would definitely be wrinkled up and pruney by the time he feels well enough to get out of the bath. Hey, another benefit to sustaining burns to 99% of his surface area.

He muffles himself in towels and his bathrobe, then shuffles through the routine of dumping clothing and bandages into the wash. Then he buzzes down to the kitchen.

“Hello?” Rita’s voice crackles through the intercom.

“I don’t have it in the tank to get dressed again,” he tells her wearily. “If you send up the soup, I think I’m gonna stay in for the rest of the night.” If he has enough energy to crawl into bed after drinking the soup that would be a miracle.

“Certainly, Larry, I understand completely.”

A mug of hot beef broth and some buttered toast appear in the dumbwaiter shortly after, and Larry drinks about half of it before bed starts to look really, really tempting. So what if he gets crumbs on the sheets? He crawls in and cocoons himself, finally nice and warm.

“God, I’m so tired,” he says, to himself, to the Spirit, to nobody in particular. Tired of living like radioactive waste, tired of avoiding staircases just in case the Spirit decides to make a break for it and his body takes a header down the stairs. He puts a gnarled hand on his sternum, feeling the arch of bone under too-fragile skin. “You hear that, pal? I know we’re stuck in here together. I’m not all that fond of my body either, but it’s the only one we’ve got.”

There’s no reply. He doesn’t expect, or particularly want, a response from the thing that lives inside him.

End.

**Author's Note:**

> Comments and feedback are lovely. If you must know, I planned a bunch of this fic using Pinterest of all things so... there's that.


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